How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

In Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land, she recounts the story of the parcel of central New York land on which she grew up. Brewer and her family had worked and lived on this land for generations when the Oneida Indians claimed that it rightfully belonged to them. Why, she wondered, did she not know what had happened to this place her grandfather called the best land. Here, she tells its story, tracing over the past four hundred years the two families—her own European settler family and the Oneida/Mohawk family of Polly Denny—who called the best land home. Situated on the passageway to the west, the ancestral land of the Oneidas was coveted by European colonizers and the founders of the Empire State. The Brewer and Denny families took part in imperial wars, the American Revolution, broken treaties, the building of the Erie Canal, Native removal, the rise and decline of family farms, bitter land claims controversies, and the revival of the Oneida Indian Nation. As Brewer makes clear in The Best Land, through centuries of violence, bravery, greed, generosity, racism, and love, the lives of the Brewer and Denny families were profoundly intertwined. The story of this homeland, she discovers, unsettles the history she thought she knew. With clear determination to tell history as it was, without sugarcoating or ignoring the pain and suffering of both families, Brewer navigates the interconnected stories with grace, humility, and a deep love for the land. The Best Land is a beautiful homage to the people, the place, and the environment itself.

James Morrow Walsh can rightfully be called the original Mountie. In late 1873 he led the first troop of scarlet-coated policemen toward the great Canadian prairie. In the summer of 1875 he was assigned to construct Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills above the Canada-U.S. border. Below the border, or medicine line as the Sioux Nation knew it, 15,000 Native Americans were drawn a year later to the camp of Sitting Bull on the Little Bighorn River. By 1877, newspaper headlines from Chicago to New York tweaked the curiosity of millions by referring to Walsh as "Sitting Bull's Boss." The years leading up to those headlines and the times that followed were the most dramatic era in the history of the west.

Exploring the mental worlds of the major groups interacting in a borderland setting, Cynthia Cumfer offers a broad, multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the Revolutionary and early national periods, leading up to the era of rapid westward expansion and Cherokee removal. Attentive to the complexities of race, gender, class, and spirituality, Cumfer offers a rare glimpse into the cultural logic of Native American, African American, and Euro-American men and women as contact with one another powerfully transformed their ideas about themselves and the territory they came to share. The Tennessee frontier shaped both Cherokee and white assumptions about diplomacy and nationhood. After contact, both groups moved away from local and personal notions about polity to embrace nationhood. Excluded from the nationalization process, slaves revived and modified African and American premises about patronage and community, while free blacks fashioned an African American doctrine of freedom that was both communal and individual. Paying particular attention to the influence of older European concepts of civilization, Cumfer shows how Tennesseans, along with other Americans and Europeans, modified European assumptions to contribute to a discourse about civilization, one both dynamic and destructive, which has profoundly shaped world history.

Another longship slid out of the cold sea and crashed onto the sandy beach. Laedian jumpedfrom the prow and bent to scoop a handful of sand before she raised her eyes to a veil of shadowat the forest's edge. "She is Khe'kenha Othar "a female voice said. "Yes, Sister, but like the others, she speaks with a discordant inner voice. They carry thepower, but they are alone, forgetting fellowship and service." "Not all of them,"a third voice said. "At least one, a woman calling herself Avanian Triumon, now walks our land with consonance of thought. I will make myself known to her, and begin her indoctrination." "White joining red," the second said aloud. "How long will it be before black returns tosilence the Khe'kenha Otharagain, extinguishing the ancient fires?" Heart of Hauden Desperate and dying, with their society plunged into chaos at the hands of the Plague Bringers, Laedian Fayersae has led her people to Hauden on the winds of a misunderstood foretelling. Silent and fading, with their ancient fires extinguished at the hands of the Dasyu, whispers by the Ganien Mothers on Hauden keep the memory of a forgotten prophecy from going dark. Thus, the accidental convergence of foretelling and prophecy begins the Harmony of the Othar Saga. Living quietly in a Minneapolis suburb, I have been writing the Harmony of the Othar Sagain variousincarnations for more years than I am willing to admit. A story which began in college has, after many years, reached fruition with my first novel, Heart of Hauden. During the intervening years, I have helped raise mydaughter, Katja, with my wife, Ann, worked in the information technology field, primarily as a database administrator, and received the support of friends and family to write as time permitted. After many years of writing in fits and starts, I stepped away from a full-time job to concentrate oncompleting this story. Perhaps it was nothing more than a classic mid-life crisis, but the result has allowedme to begin something I've dreamed about for decades. My only hope in presenting book one in the Harmonyof the Othar Sagais that you will find as much enjoyment reading it as I have found in creating it.

Extensive anthropological, ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, and historical work on the Indians of the North, Central, and South Americas and, in North America, as far east as the Mississippi Valley.